Colleges and Universities

College Students Are Losing the Ability to Read (and think)

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More food for thought (but only if you can read and think):

In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read “without complaint” as an undergraduate a decade ago…“So when a student tells me they ‘kept losing track’ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition,” Jagt wrote. “The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.” College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read – https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-losing-ability-read

No surprise then when graduates demonstrate Alarmingly Shallow Ideas.

Do we really want Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Classroom?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Classroom?

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Retraction Note to: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04787-y, published online 06 May 2025. The Editor has decided to retract this paper owing to concerns regarding discrepancies in the meta-analysis. These issues ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions. The authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction. Retraction Note: The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07310-z

The jury’s still out on AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool, but research so far paints a grim picture. Using AI chatbots can impair critical thinking, result in lower brain activity during cognitive tasks, and has been linked to memory loss. A Major Paper Claiming AI Is Good for Students Just Got Retracted, Which Is Very Bad News for Advocates of AI in the Classroom – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/study-ai-good-for-students-retracted

AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool is probably better for people who already know how to think having “learned” stuff the old fashioned way. AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool for some of the younger generations has shown promise in one area known as cheating.

Last year, a survey of some 500 Princeton seniors found that over 27 percent admitted to cheating with an AI model like ChatGPT, while about half said they knew about a violation of the honor code. If those are the numbers at a vaunted Ivy league, just imagine what conditions are like for the rest of the country. Princeton in Shambles Over AI Cheating – https://futurism.com/future-society/princeton-shambles-ai-cheating

BTW, the estimated cost of attendance for 2026-27 is $94,624 at Princeton U. https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid/fees-payment-options

Maybe the Princeton kids had to cheat because they offloaded too much of their own thinking and by default, didn’t learn how to think.

The risks of using generative artificial intelligence to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education… The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains… Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.“ The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits – https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5674741/ai-schools-education?

Your final food for thought.

The Best Retirement Letter Ever

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That’s it!

My favorite excerpt from the letter:

Let’s be honest, some people in academia are horrible, arrogant, selfish and narcissistic. And no matter how much the people at the top say they deal with bad behaviour, the nasty folk do have an annoying habit of getting promoted. The way in which academia selects and rewards particular skill sets produces an over-concentration of people who are low on empathy. I’ve met a lot of those ‘special’ colleagues over the years (no names mentioned obviously). I will not miss them one jot. They create a toxic working environment , dominate the discourse, ride roughshod over the rules, and cause a great deal of harm to others and get away scot-free. They’ve done me significant mental damage, but I can now happily forget them and move on with life.

My recommendation to anyone starting out in academia is stand your ground, challenge these energy vampires and politely make it clear that you don’t want to play their stupid toxic games. They really don’t have the power that they want you to believe they have, even though the system tends to promote them to roles that are beyond their emotional competence to fulfill. Pity them for the lack of other things to do with their lives. And, remember that 98% of what we do as academics is of no importance at all out there in the real world, so when a self-entitled colleague insists that their work on their favourite gene is earth-shattering; more important than anything you could ever do; and a good reason for their career to be advanced faster than yours; just smile and ignore them. Do your own thing, at your own pace. Have a life outside the university and remember that it’s just a job.

https://journalofhumannutritionanddieteticseditor.wordpress.com/2023/11/27/thats-it/

We Don’t Need No Education (with apologies to Pink Floyd)

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Enrollment declines continued to worsen this spring. Total post-secondary enrollment fell to 16.2 million this spring, marking a one-year decline of 4.1 percent or 685,000 students. Enrollment declined this spring at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Following a 3.5 percent drop last spring, post-secondary institutions have lost nearly 1.3 million students since spring 2020. Undergraduate enrollment accounted for most of the decline, dropping 4.7 percent this spring or over 662,000 students from spring 2021. As a result, the undergraduate student body is now 9.4 percent or nearly 1.4 million students smaller than before the pandemic.

National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estimates/

I wonder why so many kids are not going to college.

Taxpayers Face $435 Billion in Student-Loan Losses

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Taxpayers face a loss of $435 billion on the $1.37 trillion in student loans on the government’s financial statement at the beginning of this year, even if no additional loans are issued going forward, according to an internal study by the Department of Education, reported by the Wall Street Journal which reviewed the documents. Most of the losses would come from the already established income-based repayment programs and the debt forgiveness at the end of their term.

But who ultimately got this money, since students were just the conduit? The educational-financial-industrial complex, of course, the entities that have lined up to clean out the taxpayer via these student loans. Billionaires have been printed in the process, enabled and encouraged by the government since 2009. Any solution to the student-loan crisis needs to include measures that shut down that money-transfer and return the government’s role in student loans to where it had been before 2009.

Taxpayers Face $435 Billion in Student-Loan Losses, Already Baked in: Leaked Education-Department Study — https://wolfstreet.com/2020/11/22/taxpayers-face-435-billion-in-student-loan-losses-already-baked-in-department-of-education-study/

And let’s not forget who The Great Enabler was behind the college leaders’ lack of caring for their students College Presidents Fail to Protect Students from Covid-19 – College Clusterfuck Update 11.22.20. Politicians, of course.

We. Are. Doomed.

College Presidents Fail to Protect Students from Covid-19 – College Clusterfuck Update 11.22.20

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In fact, university Presidents — leaders, let us remember — did not mobilize to protect students from Covid. Frankly, I never thought they did, because I do try to pay attention to these things, but to prove it to myself, I went through 33 pages of headlines for the Coronavirus tag in the Chronicle of Higher Education, all the way back to the first entry on February 24 (“Coronavirus-Themed Party at Albany Draws Criticism“)…

As it turns out, protecting students from Covid was never a top priority for University Presidents. The American Council on Education (“a membership organization that mobilizes [ha] the higher education community to shape effective public policy and foster innovative, high-quality practice”) has published periodic surveys on what University Presidents consider pressing issues.

College Presidents Fail to Mobilize to Protect Students from Covid-19 — https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/university-administrators-fail-to-mobilize-protect-students-covid-19.html

The author of this article doesn’t attempt to hide his bias or contempt for the so-called leaders of our colleges and universities. I’ve made no attempt to hide my disdain either (sharp eyed readers will note my title above deletes two words from the original article title). The college clusterfuck has been one of my recurring themes:

Colleges’ Opening Fueled 3,000 COVID Cases a Day (College Clusterfuck Update)

“I slept on the floor, and woke up to ants crawling on my bed.”

College Clusterfuck 2.0 – “It’s a Dystopian Hell” – Updated

College Town Clusterfuck

The full article contains some pretty sorrid stuff. Enjoy!

Online education will become the standard operating model for higher education. Thousands of colleges and universities will go belly up. Professor Galloway at NYU says it’s simple math. See Galloway’s comments here: Post Pandemic Changes in Consumer Behavior

Quote for Today – 09.19.20

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Higher education committed suicide with its dual racketeering model. First was the college loan racket, in which schools colluded with the federal government to jam too many “customers” through the pipeline who didn’t belong there, and who buried themselves under a lifetime debt obligation they could never escape. The second was the intellectual racket of creating sham fields of study that contaminated all the other “humanities” with poisonous bullshit theory, and eventually even invaded the STEM disciplines. Covid-19 screwed the pooch on all that, scotching the four-year party-hearty in-residence part of the deal. For now, who needs an online class in Contemporary Sexual Transgression ($2000-a-credit) when you can just click on Porn-hub for free? Hundreds of colleges and universities will be going out of business in the years ahead.

James Howard Kunstler — https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/things-going-by/#more-‘